Marine dedicates his life to leaving no one behind, Part 1

Students in Professor Harry Smith’s class were given the opportunity to question a Marine veteran and Navy Cross recipient who, since leaving active duty service, has helped locate the remains of 400 American service members labeled as Missing in Action around the world. 

Justin LeHew is currently the Chief Executive Officer of History Flight, a nonprofit group billed as the world’s most successful private MIA search and recovery organization. He spent over 30 years in active duty as a Marine, including combat experience in the War on Terror. 

LeHew was invited to Central College to take questions by Smith, whom he met through an NBC News story focused on his efforts to locate those MIA. 

Students were encouraged at the prior class to research LeHew and come prepared with questions for Tuesday’s class. Before delving into his work with History Flight, LeHew shared some of his experiences and wisdom while answering questions. 

Also in the audience was Lance Fremmel, a Marine who served with LeHew in Nejaf, Iraq. LeHew shared the story of a battle they faced in a shrine surrounded by a cemetery. 

One of the first questions from the students was how one can mentally prepare for a situation such as that. For LeHew, it came down to training and experience. He had already fought in the Gulf War. 

In the battlefield, traits such as ethnicity of the person standing next to you do not matter, LeHew said. The Marines are a “most beautiful, chaotic mashup of human beings,” he said. 

Though one can have experience and training, fear remains. 

“I think anybody who has sanity is afraid,” LeHew said. Leadership, in the position he was in, requires an understanding of the goal involved and doing what it takes to achieve it. This includes knowing the strengths of those in your team. 

“A good leader understands their position as it relates to their people,” he said. Challenges when leading soldiers in a war include appropriate reactions to empathy. When clearing an area in the War on Terror, he was often faced with children and non-combatants. Recognizing that actions rarely go according to plan is another key to survival. 

“Resiliency is one of the biggest things a human being can learn,” LeHew said. The key is understanding that, regardless of one’s awareness of it, someone is always watching you. When you do something, LeHew says nine or ten people will follow suit – simply because it is you. 

Assisting veterans’ recovery from the mental scars of war does not have a singular solution. Everyone on the battlefield has their own experiences – even if it is a shared incident with others in their unit, one’s experience is still unique. We each have to process trauma on our own in an individual’s specific way. LeHew’s advice to the students was to find something good to overwrite the bad. 

He showed the students a bag he carries that bears the names of over 40 of his fellow service members that he could not save. The key is to consider the four or five that he was able to save. Anger can be a root of trauma that can hold people back, and prevent them from being the best versions of themselves, he said. 

“Everybody comes home with survivor’s guilt,” LeHew said. “I don’t wrestle with that.” Instead, he has learned to have coping skills to understand that everyone has trauma. Everyone has lost a family member, a pet or something else they love. 

Symbols of one’s heroic deeds, such as LeHew’s Navy Cross and Bronze Star, can bring back memories of the events that led to them. LeHew does not wear his – not because he’s not proud of them, but because each time he puts them on, he relives those moments. 

According to information from Military Times, LeHew earned one of the 100 Navy Crosses awarded in the war for actions March 23-24, 2003, when he led a rescue team to save another unit. This included evacuating four soldiers – including two critically wounded – on his own under heavy enemy fire. He then climbed into his vehicle and suppressed the enemy and inspired his Marines to place their weapons in a position that repelled “numerous waves of attackers”. 

“In the midst of the battle, an Amphibious Assault Vehicle was destroyed, killing or wounding all its occupants. Gunnery Sergeant LeHew immediately moved to recover the nine Marines. He again exposed himself to a barrage of fire as he worked for nearly an hour recovering casualties from the wreckage,” the story goes on to say. 

He told the Central students he was “wowed” to receive the honor in the zone and not the Pentagon. But he added that while he saw what he did as routine, others saw something completely different. 

His actions play into the Marines’ motto of leaving no one behind. In his service experience, his unit continued to have its deployment extended. However, individual soldiers had met their obligations to the military and were eligible to come home. 

In many cases, these soldiers chose to re-enlist or otherwise extend their service because they did not want to abandon their brethren who were still in danger. When missions are completed and units are broken up to be assigned to new missions, there was trauma among them to be split from those who had become family. The separation is also one of the major sources of trauma for soldiers when they leave the service and come home. 

“A Marine does not want to let a fellow Marine down,” LeHew told the class. “It greatly reduces the fear when you believe your brothers and sisters will take care of you.” 

He encourages everyone to not let their time in the service be the best thing in their lives, as there is so much more waiting for them. 

The students’ questions and LeHew’s answers took most of the scheduled class period before he could share much about his work with History Flight. LeHew was very complimentary of the students – most of whom came to the front of the room to shake his hand and thank him before they left. 

“Those kids are going to have to handle a more wicked hard problem than any of our generations have ever had to handle before,” LeHew said of them. “But what I'm here to say is, I know how they're made, and that gives me the confidence to know that when they are tested in ways that they don't believe, they themselves are going to be able to live up to this or to do that. Their generation is going to do just as good as any other generation that came before. Because why would we not want them to be like that? We need them to be better because they're going to have to deal with more wicked hard problems than any of our generations ever did. So I am. I am there, whether they know it or not. I am this generation's biggest fan. They're my team. They're my home team. I'm the pennant waving on the sidelines because I'm not the man in the arena anymore, and I. and I am the person put on the earth now to give them all the resources, confidence, and load them up, and then boom, send them out, and then just sit back with popcorn watching the magnificent stuff that they do.”